Hello hello,
Recently, I walked up in the hills while talking on the phone to my friend. It was icy up there, but sunny too, and beautiful. My friend has had a hard year, experienced many losses. I miss them. Suddenly, in one hour, over the phone I can picture how easily our lives could fit into each others.
I walk through the front door after we get off the phone and Dani is there, with a fresh haircut, lighting a fire. Suddenly, I want it all-together. I want to meet their child, hold her little hand. Play a game. On the phone I express my ambivalence about having children of my own. Explain my enjoyment in being a kind of glamorous aunt character, free of certain responsibilities and developing new circles. Eccentric retirees who like fashion and antiques, children long grown up, and/or lovely childless gay men who like to sing and drink wine and use good silver.
But then we speak, and I long to meld it all together. My friend’s voice, and Dani’s haircut and we could keep their little girl from touching the wood burner but she could toddle around the warm room while my friend and I chat in the kitchen. My friend, concentrating on some task would make this little triple humming sound they always do. Hmm Hmm Hmm, in a certain sing song way, notes down-up-down, the same three tones every time. A tone which means being observed but also carrying on. A tone with purpose. Executing something. I can picture them making bread, in this ground floor apartment when I was 19 and had taken a bus from New York to Pennsylvania to visit them. I can hear it in my memory a thousand other times too.
They possess a soothing forceful quality, like a ship slicing through water. Elegant, solid, direct. Calmly protesting being overtaken by the sea via constant forward motion, no matter what. When they talk now, there is soft-sadness. It’s been that kind of year. I am conscious of a balance between what is happening and other levities. It is also relaxing, not difficult to feel what I have always felt. I think they feel the same. We don’t talk enough but it is not difficult, once we do.
I think I spend most of my life, psychologically, in a kind of fortress. This is not too difficult because I have many hobbies and desires. I focus on the environment around me, on everything I want to do, while simultaneously imbuing it with all the narratives I have built from everyone and everything that happened before. In this way I honor the people I don’t get to see using a kind of silent doctrine, enforced in every day life. Sometimes when I cook I make Aisling’s sound: hmm hmm hmm. I can invoke them, in my kitchen. I try and fail too, every summer, to remember how they taught me to slice watermelon.
It is this way, with my family also. With everyone I have ever loved. In my perpetual distance, I relish details of the past, make them narrative, and perform them in a series of rituals, that, combined, constitute my understanding of the world.
The way someone moved their head while making a joke. The way someone makes a bed or folds a bath towel. A method for cooking rice. A method for making omelettes. The tapping of fingertips on cheeks when excited. The special inflections or word-shortenings or nicknames. Bars of soap to scent dresser drawers. I keep something from everyone and remember it and like to roll it out occasionally, often only for myself, tack it to the wall to watch over me for the evening, so I might feel close to whomever it belongs.
This is how I survive in all my new environments. This is how I carry on when I miss people. But then, I talk to them, and am flooded with longing, wishing I could have more.
It’s the same lately, with my grandmothers. One who I haven’t seen in 6 years, the other 4. I will finally see them this January, and on the phone, they each say something like: Oh dolly, in their separate tenors. Oh dolly, I can’t wait to hug you.
Dolly Dolly Dolly. My nickname flashes in my mind, rolls around my mouth, like something I have nearly forgotten. I am like this old house I live in, made of stone and fairly sturdy, but then my name in their mouths unlatches me just a little. The earth shifts, the structure moves. This is what it is like. I am fine without them until I am with them.
Plus, why does my life always lead me far away? Or, is that trend over, and will I remain somewhere now? Remain here? Sometimes I don’t mind that idea and sometimes it gives me a shiver.
I picture San Diego, I picture the bridge from North Park to South. I picture the lobby of Natalie’s building. I picture Louisiana Street. I picture Morley Field. I picture the clock tower on 6th Avenue at 6:15 in the morning. I picture my beautiful bedroom, cold but flooded with light, all my books along the wall. I picture the bridge, arching up grandly in red, promising fresh air, romance, reprieve. I picture Dekalb Avenue, the line at Di Palo’s, Fall trees walking towards Fort Greene. I play a little slide projector of my life to myself, this is what I do.
In actuality, it is Winter in the Welsh countryside. A great time and place for contemplation and melancholy. Grey from morning until night. A vitamin D deficiency is, looked at most optimistically, good fodder for sentiment and writing.
My advice to you is this: put some nutmeg in your lentils. I was using a Canal House recipe the other day and they had nutmeg in their lentils, and my god, a revelation. It was cotechino (this fabulous decadent sausage full of pig’s cheek you have to boil for like two hours before frying it up in little diagonal slices) and lentils, for a friend’s birthday dinner.
I also recommend the Canal House cook books. They are so cozy and unselfconscious of being so. Two middle aged ladies who like to have a cocktail, who like to do sort of cute suburban things but also have flourishes of the continental. Do you know what I mean by that? Like, picture a blonde woman giving you a cucumber-basil cocktail, and despite the voice in the back of your head telling you what some boy in the natural wine world would say about it, or somebody in your Foucault class in college would say about it, the cucumber cocktail this lady is giving you tastes GOOD. Plus she is also introducing you to Cotechino, so suddenly the past and the present is making sense. There is a time and place for everything. Melissa and Christopher want you to have a nice time. They want you to reconcile Sunset Magazine and France in your heart. The hearth is lit and you and your best friend have carved out solid little lives for yourself when the economy was better and nothing really bad has ever happened. You’re cooking together all day long in a gorgeous canal house. It’s like Gilmore Girls in a cookbook, but with more talent and panache.
Here is their recipe for the lentils:
I naturally, added butter, so an olive oil/butter combo. I also fried the little diagonal sausage slices before arranging on the bowls of lentils to add some textural distinction. I recommend doing so.
Sending love to you all, near and far. xxxx